Today I'm announcing that I'm leaving Microsoft Research.
My plan is to take a break to finish the book on Parallel and
Concurrent Haskell for O'Reilly, before taking up a position at
Facebook in the UK in March 2013.
This is undoubtedly a big change, both for me and for the Haskell
community. I'll be stepping back from full-time GHC development and
research and heading into industry, hopefully to use Haskell. It's an
incredibly exciting opportunity for me, and one that I hope will
ultimately be a good thing for Haskell too.
What does this mean for GHC? Obviously I'll have much less time to
work on GHC, but I do hope to find time to fix a few bugs and keep
things working smoothly. Simon Peyton Jones will still be leading the
project, and we'll still have support from Ian Lynagh, and of course
the community of regular contributors. Things are in a reasonably
stable state - there haven't been any major architectural changes in
the RTS lately, and while we have just completed the switchover to the
new code generator, I've been working over the past few weeks to
squeeze out all the bugs I can find, and I'll continue to do that over
the coming months up to the 7.8.1 release.
In due course I hope that GHC can attract more of you talented hackers
to climb the learning curve and start working on the internals, in
particular the runtime and code generators, and I'll do my best to
help that happen.
Cheers,
Simon